Village: Chinese River Filthy Before Spill

By ALEXA OLESEN

BEIJING – Chinese authorities rushed to soak up a toxic coal tar spill in a river Saturday before it reached a city reservoir downstream, but villagers said the water has been filthy and undrinkable for years.

About 10,000 people were helping authorities use straw mats, cotton quilts and other materials to soak up 60 tons of toxic sludge spilled Monday into the Dasha River in northern Shanxi province before it reached Baoding, a city of 10 million, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The news agency said 100 trucks and earth movers dumped dirt into the Dasha River to form 51 dams, slowing the water’s flow to a near-standstill. Officials also were using 70 tons of activated carbon to help absorb pollutants.

The spill occurred when a truck, overloaded with coal tar, crashed and its contents spilled into the water. Xinhua said the driver failed to tell traffic officials that he had been carrying coal tar when he first reported the accident, delaying initial cleanup efforts.

The efforts came as the government said an explosion at a chemical plant in eastern China killed 14 people and injured 30 in the third major industrial disaster in the nation this week.

Xinhua said it was still not known how many people had been in the factory on Friday when the explosion happened. It was the second blast to hit China’s chemical industry this week.

Villagers who live on the Dasha River, meanwhile, said they had not used its water for years because it already seemed extremely polluted and its fish had died off.

A woman who would only give her surname, Gao, said by telephone that waste from nearby iron mines had made the water unusable for the past four or five years.

Gao said she lives a few minutes walk from the river in Shentangbu town, a few miles downstream from the spill site.

Shanxi province relies heavily on its mining industry and is one of China’s top coal and iron producers.

Most of China’s canals, rivers and lakes are severely tainted by pollution. Only about a third of the 3.7 billion tons of wastewater discharged by China’s huge cities each year is treated.

Officials from the Environmental Protection Bureaus of Shanxi province, where the spill occurred, and Anhui province, where Baoding is located, confirmed Xinhua’s description of the cleanup effort. They said it was unclear how polluted the river was before the spill.

Photos taken near the crash site showed massive pools of black sludge mixed with river water, while stretches downstream were yellow from the piles of earth dumped into the river to try to slow down the spill.

About 500 holes had been dug in the ground near the river to divert the spill, Xinhua said.

"The river is all yellow and it smells really terrible," said a woman from Shentangbu, who would only give her surname, Wang.

She said by telephone that the smell reminded her of tar and that the pollution seemed much worse since Monday’s spill.

The coal tar has traveled about 11 miles downstream and was about 34 miles from Baoding’s Wangkuai Reservoir on Saturday, Xinhua said. That reservoir is said to be used for irrigation and industry, while another city reservoir provides drinking water.

It was the latest in a series of mishaps to degrade China’s waterways. Officials say there have been at least 76 water pollution accidents in the past six months.